Stereotyping Wildlife Crime Must Stop

Early this year, the Wildlife Crime Control Bureau (WCCB) issued an alert regarding organised wildlife crime networks involved in tiger poaching.

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It called for greater patrolling and surveillance and preventive measures. Following this, states like Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Uttarakhand, and Maharashtra issued their own alerts.

Media reports uncovered the pervasive extent of organised poaching networks across states and neighbouring countries. Despite this organised wildlife trade's far-reaching impacts, the recent alerts do not focus on strengthening investigative capacities and tracing financial links through inter-departmental coordination. Instead, the singular focus is on forest-dwelling nomadic communities and amping up the everyday surveillance of their lives.

Disturbingly, the WCCB memo relies on an earlier advisory in naming seven nomadic communities—Pardhis, Bahelias, Bawarias, Saperas, Mongyas, Banjaras, and Kanjars—their modus operandi, which summarises their occupations and their habits to a disturbing detail, leaving out any inter-state and transnational traders. The state-wide alert issued by the principal chief conservator of forests (wildlife) (PCCF), MP lists out surveillance measures such as regular search of settlements, use of dog squads, creation of a database and registration in local police stations.

The wholesale statutory sanction in treating entire communities as suspects is not new, and harkens back to the draconian legacy of the Criminal Tribes Act (CTA). The disproportionate focus, surveillance, and blanket association of criminality, as seen in this case due to the involvement of a few individuals from these communities, follows the exact logic of group and associated crime based on caste and tribe.